Discussion

Food tour

I'm a newbie here, but hopefully you all can give me some good suggestions.

I'm a junior in high school and over summer break, which starts in two days, I want to visit as many good restaurants as possible. I live in Monrovia, CA, so any restaurants in any surrounding area including Pasadena, Duarte, Arcadia, Sierra Madre, Azusa, San Dimas, or anywhere else in or near Los Angeles would be awesome. I also go to Disneyland a lot, so anything you can recommend in Anaheim would be good as well.

I love all types of food so anything from Thai to Mexican to Chinese to Japanese to Korean to Italian to American or anything else you have would be appreciated,

Along with the restaurant, it would be cool if you could include your favorite dish or some of their more popular dishes.

Well, near Disneyland is what many consider the best Thai restaurant in Southern California, Thai Nakorn. It's on Beach Blvd. and Chapman Ave. in Stanton (be aware that if you Google, you'll come up with a bunch of hits on Garden Grove Blvd. -- that location burned down 6 months ago and is being rebuilt).

You live in Monrovia -- you are within twenty minutes' drive of the best Chinese food on the West Coast, all in the San Gabriel Valley. To get you started, there's fantastic dim sum (888 and NBC would be my picks for cart-style dim sum, Mission 261 and New Concept for order-from-a-menu kind -- bring your friends). Green Village on Valley Blvd. in San Gabriel has fantastic Shanghainese cuisine -- get the pork pump (actually part of the leg, despite its weird name), get the bean curd in pork sauce. Directly across the street is Mei Long Village, which might be the best xiao long bao (steamed pork or crab dumplings with soup actually inside the dumplings). There's so much more -- there's a branch of Seafood Village, for very good Chiu Chow style cuisine, there are more Cantonese restaurants than you can shake a chopstick at, there are Sichuan restaurants, there are Beijing restaurants, and oodles and oodles of Taiwanese places (including Sin Ba La, in Arcadia).

Also in the SGV, on San Gabriel Blvd. between Valley Blvd. and the 10, is Babita Mexicuisine, which is very, very good sit-down Mexico City-style Mexican food. These are not the tacos you know... they serve things like chiles en nogada, which is meat-stuffed peppers in pomegranate sauce.